Gartner Group study, 90% of businesses lack an understanding of the total financial impact of printing and copying.
Do you know how much your business spends on print and copy expenses?
If the answer is no, you are not alone. According to a Gartner Group study, 90% of businesses lack an understanding of the total financial impact of printing and copying.
The two biggest reasons for this lack of clarity are:
- Printing and copying expenses are often split between office equipment costs and office supply expenses.
- Printers and copiers are often managed separately yet used interchangeably.
Considering the average employee prints 34 pages per day at a cost of around $725 per year per employee, printing and copying expenses are typically the third greatest business expense behind payroll and rent.
A Brief History of Office Printing & Copying
In 1959 Xerox introduced the first commercially available copier, the Xerox 914, and forever changed the speed at which information could be shared. With offices now able to share information through copies, copying boomed with Americans making 14 billion copies per year by 1966.
Commercially available laser printers became available in the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until offices began to replace typewriters with personal computers throughout the 1980s that printers became the next logical step in the progression of office technology.
By the 1990s the reduced cost of printers made them an appealing choice to improve workplace efficiency and privacy regulations began requiring sensitive information be printed in more secure, limited access areas. So, companies began adopting individual printers to supplement centrally located copiers.
Through the early 2000s, office networking technology continued to improve and shifted the focus of printing and copying technology back to a centralized environment, focused around the multi-function printer/copier, or multi-function device (MFD), that typically provides the ability to print, copy, scan, and/or fax. However, with the even lower price of individual, desktop printers, many employees retained a personal printer for convenience and information security.
In this modern office environment, businesses typically have a good handle on the printing and copying activity conducted through the central MFD but have little knowledge or ability to conduct accurate data analysis on the amount and cost of printing to the individual desktop printers.